Anxiety as an algorithm

It's a thought provoking post.

One refinement is that there are a number of earlier challenges you faced that are now "solved problems" so some of the squares should be marked blue instead of black or white because it's a risk you have encountered and mastered. For example, how to file taxes as a corporation. How to hire someone.

A second refinement: there are also decision rules you can follow that limit your exposure to entire categories of risk. For example: don't finance your startup using credit card debt.

> Developing a habit of recognizing thoughts as distinct from reality has been shown to reduce anxiety. For more information on this approach see here.

I think this helps with catastrophic thinking (i.e. "I'll never pass another technical interview if I quit my job -> My girlfriend will leave me -> I'll run out of money -> I'll be on the street" etc.), verbalizing this kind of thing can help show that often the extreme worst case thinking seems a little more ridiculous out loud.

It also helps to imagine a friend thinking these things and what you would say or point out to them.

I suspect that a lot of anxiety comes from too actively predicting future negative outcomes along with too much uncertainty, as you get more comfortable with things anxiety tends to go down. The problem with growing a company is if you're successful you'll never get comfortable because things are always changing and scaling up (like mentioned in the article).

I've also found it personally helpful to reframe failure as 'learning experience' and now you know more of what works and what doesn't (rather than a direct evaluation of some fixed ability), this helps embrace failure and growth without constantly doubting yourself or thinking that you may just not have the capacity to do what you want.

Sometimes it can be hard to zero in on the anxiety cause though - it took me a while to realize that one of the reasons I didn't want to go to the city (SF) is that I was afraid I wouldn't find parking, along with just generally more uncertainty in a crowded/busy place. Sounds ridiculous, but high base anxiety can make pushing yourself out of local maxima to do things you want a constant vigilant effort. The easy thing to do is rationalize why the status quo is better or why the status quo is actually what you want. I think a lot of people do this without realizing anxiety is a partial driver of those decisions.

I only skimmed so I might have missed these points being discussed...

The 'mental immune system', which uses imagination to search for potential paths to classify likely future outcomes suffers from one very critical issue.

Selection bias / neural network (literal) training set problems. Repeated failures without success lead to the weight of that success against the failures skewing the prediction algorithm. Reality might or might not match the perceived lack of paths worth perusing, but the weight of that imagined failure against the slim odds of success surely also influences the ability to take the paths that could work even if they are discovered.

Repairing a biological entity's neural network for predicting future outcomes must surely also correlate with providing a 'good' feed of data to re-normalize expectations. My own theory and belief is that our evolutionary ancestors communities were small and 'depression' or other signs of distress resulted in this reconditioning; a social control rather than a directly biological one. Modern society seems to have broken that control loop and thus the situation becomes irreparable.

I have noticed a tendency (especially amongst HN articles and readers) to continually compare our bodies, minds, souls etc. to machines, as if they could be "biohacked" into perfection with just the right patches or software updates. Or that we could easily be replaced by the "correct AI" algorithm, if we could just get the simulation close enough.

Not that I don't believe we aren't complex systems, we are, to be sure, and it's not that life doesn't hurt sometimes, as it surely does.

But the whole idea really just grates on me. I like being a monkey, with all my strengths and weaknesses, I wouldn't trade that to be a cyborg for all the money in the world. Each to their own I guess! I guess I just don't think the analogies, simulations, etc. really do us much justice as a species.

Are you saying talking to an encouraging family (encouraging being re-normalization) was the ancestral solution for depression?